Below you will find a full listing of the Graduate course offerings for Fall 2011. Undergraduate course offerings will be posted as soon as they are available!
Grad students, please email Gina for priority numbers. Registration begins Monday, April 11.
ENG. 100: Modern Critical Theories (72719)
T. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Elda Tsou
This course, co-taught with the history department, is an intensive introduction to contemporary theory and criticism at the graduate level. Its aim is to familiarize the beginning graduate student with the significant theorists and theoretical movements of the last few decades. Readings will cover psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, as well as theories of gender and sexuality and racial formation.
ENG. 110: Introduction to the Profession (73202)
T. 7:10-9:10 p.m.
Dr. Steve Mentz
This seminar on methods and practices will proceed through several different tracks. Our shared text will be Gregory Colon Semenza’s Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities (2nd ed 2010). This book meticulously charts the life-cycle of a doctoral student in English, from the seminar room to the conference circuit to the interview suite. We’ll interleave discussions and practical exercises drawn from Semenza’s book with detailed close analyses of four literary texts from different periods in English literature: Anglo-Saxon lyric poems, including “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and “The Wife’s Lament”; Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra; Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and Gary Shtengart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Several faculty members will make guest appearances to share their work and their perspectives on English studies. Each student will also chronicle his or her semester through an academic blog, a form of informal but public scholarly writing that we hope each of you will continue after the semester ends.
ENG. 120: Composition Theory and the Teaching of Writing (74296)
R. 5:00-7:00 pm
Dr. Carmen Kynard
Very few college students major in or extensively study composition theory so entering this field now may seem illusory for many of you. This course is designed to challenge that illusion and, instead, highlight the realities of contemporary, cross-disciplinary, and multi-audienced research and scholarship related to discourse and literacies. We will examine four, central themes that enliven composition theory:
1) intellectual biographies of the field;
2) archival treatments of writing instruction and rhetorical study;
3) ethnographic studies of writing and rhetoric in local contexts;
4) polemical presentations of the varied institutional politics that liberate and/or inhibit college writers, writing studies, and writing programs.
You will not be expected to know the whole continuum of scholars and theories central to these four themes, but you will be expected to transact critically with the texts we read for class. Our own reading and writing will be organized in ways that interrogate the relationships amongst scholars and theories of the field. This means that we will push past seeing our course readings as singular texts and instead examine the contexts, histories, and tropes a composition scholar is aligned with or counter-scripting. One course cannot possibly acquaint you with all of composition theory and its influence on the teaching of writing; however, the guided assignments of the course will make you conversant with and in the field. We will study key moments with breadth and depth so that you can ground your own research, perspectives, and standing as a scholar and researcher of composition/rhetoric and writing studies. Be prepared to read a lot, question the boundaries of what you thought constituted writing/literacy research, and enter critical discussions of the field with knowledge and flair.
ENG. 380: Topics in Early Modern Studies (75127)
The Exile and the Cosmopolitan
M. 7:10-9:10 p.m.
Dr. Brian Lockey
The critic George Steiner once remarked that the entire corpus of twentieth-century Western literature was extra-territorial, a literature written by exiles, refugees, and expatriates about the experience of the political or religious outsider. But what about earlier centuries? The early modern period is often seen as the period which gave rise to the modern European nation-state, a process that excluded substantial populations both internally and externally. The rise of the early modern English nation, for example, produced first a community of Protestant exiles, who fled to continental Europe, and then, with the ascension of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, a large community of Catholic recusants in England who refused to participate in the newly-established Anglican regime and a thriving community of Catholic exiles on the continent who established clerical missions to support their beleaguered English counterparts.
This course considers how the experiences and writings of such external and internal exiles influenced the fictional writings of the period. We will begin by considering some contemporary theorists on the topic of exile, including writings by Edward Said and Walter Mignolo. Then we will move on to the period itself, looking at the history of the English Catholic exiles on the continent and their complex influence on what I call the English cosmopolitans: erudite travelers such as Sir John Harington, Anthony Munday, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney, who saw their local identity as informed by the international sphere. Secondarily, we will briefly consider the mid-seventeenth-century community of royalist exiles and their influence on later traditions of cosmopolitans. As was the case with my seminar on the Exile in fall 2010, this course focuses on research I am doing for an upcoming book on Early Modern cosmopolitanism; however, this course will cover different authors from the material that I taught in the fall 2010 seminar. In other words, both new students and my old students should find something worthwhile in this course.
ENG. 580: Study of Nineteenth-Century British Authors (74631) Special Topic: “Jane Austen Today”
W. 3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Dr. Amy King
“…provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.” —Northanger Abbey
This course concentrates on the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817), and the various ways in which her work has been understood and ideologically situated both in her own moment and in ours. That is, Austen in her own time— in relation to the politics, culture, aesthetics, and literary landscape of the early nineteenth century— and “today”: what does our society want or need from Austen’s novels? That is, we will engage a selection of popularizations of Austen’s works, including: Rudyard Kipling’s 1920 WWI story “The Janeites”; contemporary filmic adaptations both traditional (BBC etc) and revisionary (Clueless, Bride & Prejudice, Metropolitan, Bridget Jones’ Diary etc); and selections from contemporary Austen-engaged narratives, including The Three Weissmans of Westport, The Cookbook Collector, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Vampire Darcy’s Desire, Jane Bites Back etc). First and foremost, however, we will focus on Austen’s novels themselves, especially their linguistic texture, as well such things as: the way irony in the text works; the exigencies of free-indirect discourse; the senses of individual words (and their importance to larger moral or aesthetic issues in the text); the structure of conversation etc. We will query whether Austen is, as the Victorians believed her to be, “gentle Jane” or a wicked satirist; whether she avoided the politics of her time or engaged them domestically; whether she was an early feminist or a conservative about gender norms. We will read the six mature novels— Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818)—in order of publication rather than composition. In addition to reading and viewing the popularizations, we will read a selection of articles and chapters from the robust canon of Austen criticism, as well as dip into her letters and biography.
ENG. 725 Modern Drama (75131)
T. 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Dr. Angela Belli
This course is intended to enhance the graduate student’s knowledge of literature by focusing on the development of modern drama, especially considering its varied modes and themes, taking into account its transition from a critique of the prevailing “authoritative” society to a chronicle of social and political issues within various cultural contexts. Attention will also be paid to the craft of the theater as an art form. Plays for study will include celebrated works from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Playwrights will include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Sean O’Casey, Eugene O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Robert Bolt, and John Osborne.
ENG. 770: Studies in 20th Cent. Amer. Lit. (75129)
“Young Adult Literature”
“Young Adult Literature”
M. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Derek Owens
In this course we will dive into the rich world of Young Adult literature, specifically fiction written mainly for audiences between the ages of 12 and 18. We’ll start by reading The Diary of Anne Frank which, while not an example of YA literature per se, provides us with the authentic voice of an adolescent writing under considerable odds. After this you’ll choose a work of “classic YA” to read (for example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, etc.)—works which were either aimed at a YA audience (before it was termed as such) or featured the voice of a YA protagonist. Then we’ll spend the rest of the course looking at 6 more modern and contemporary works. We’ll all read several titles taken from a list that includes Hatchet; The Giver; Monster; How I Live Now; A Hope in the Unseen; The Hunger Games; Stonecutter; The Watsons Go to Birmingham Jail, 1963; Glimpse; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. You’ll also be able to read several titles of your own choosing. Throughout the semester you’ll read a total of 8 books (they go fast). Assignments will include short weekly written responses, and 1 longer work that will either be a critical exploration of certain texts through a particular lens, or your own work of YA fiction with a critical introduction.
In this course we will dive into the rich world of Young Adult literature, specifically fiction written mainly for audiences between the ages of 12 and 18. We’ll start by reading The Diary of Anne Frank which, while not an example of YA literature per se, provides us with the authentic voice of an adolescent writing under considerable odds. After this you’ll choose a work of “classic YA” to read (for example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, etc.)—works which were either aimed at a YA audience (before it was termed as such) or featured the voice of a YA protagonist. Then we’ll spend the rest of the course looking at 6 more modern and contemporary works. We’ll all read several titles taken from a list that includes Hatchet; The Giver; Monster; How I Live Now; A Hope in the Unseen; The Hunger Games; Stonecutter; The Watsons Go to Birmingham Jail, 1963; Glimpse; The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian. You’ll also be able to read several titles of your own choosing. Throughout the semester you’ll read a total of 8 books (they go fast). Assignments will include short weekly written responses, and 1 longer work that will either be a critical exploration of certain texts through a particular lens, or your own work of YA fiction with a critical introduction.
ENG 855: Theory of the Novel (75130)
R. 2:45-4:45 p.m.
Dr. Kathleen Lubey
This course will acquaint students with the “long history” of novel theory and the changing ways in which literary critics have defined the origins, attributes, and socio-political function of the genre. We will read a few novels as test cases for our theoretical readings, probably by Henry Fielding, Virginia Woolf, and J.M. Coetzee. But our discussions will be rooted in understanding the enduring questions that are diversely taken up by literary critics of the novel: what formal and ideological features define the novel? What is the relationship between the novel form and modernity? What politics are mobilized by the genre’s unique ways of formulating subjectivity and the objective world? These and other questions will be pursued as we understand the singularity of each novel theorist as well as the dialogue each critic sustains with the larger field. Our theoretical readings will cover “old” and “new” formalisms (Frye, Booth, Lukacs, Bakhtin; Gallagher, Levine); post-structural challenges to genre theory (Culler, Derrida); theories of the novel’s origins and social politics (Watt, McKeon, Moretti, Jameson, Benjamin); theories of the novel and gender (Sedgwick, Armstrong, Brown), and of its post-colonial context (Attridge, Appiah). Evaluation will be based on participation and papers, equaling 20-25 pages.
ENG. 885: Topics in Cultural Studies (75128)
M. 2:45-4:45 p.m.
Dr. Stephen P. Miller
This course will begin by providing perspective on cultural studies by studying four forerunners within the field who wrote before the term “cultural studies” was coined in the 1960s. We will discuss cultural and professional pressures resulting in distinctive “proto-cultural studies” texts by Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Antonio Gramsci, and Roman Jakobson. An understanding of their overlapping and conflicting literary, socioeconomic, political, mystical, semiotic, and ethnic concerns provide a backdrop for considering recent works of cultural studies by writers such as Sander Gilman, Jonathan Boyarin, Jefferson Cowie, Judith Stein, and Perry Meisel.
ENG. 975: Doctor of Arts Research and Workshop (75057)
M. 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Dr. Jennifer Travis
This course is designed to assist students through all stages of the dissertation process. Students must register for this course from the start through the completion of the dissertation. The three credit course, in which students are required to enroll for two semesters, guides students through the early stages of dissertation research and writing and assists more advanced students in peer-review and revision. Students will choose and/or refine a dissertation topic, write a dissertation proposal, develop a dissertation timeline for completion of chapters, workshop a chapter with peers, and cultivate effective writing strategies. For more advanced students, the course will emphasize peer-review workshops, techniques for revision, and strategies for completion.
ENG. 500: Colloquia (70345)
ENG. 900: Master’s Research (71272)
ENG. 901: Readings and Research (71273)
ENG. 910: Readings and Research (74682)
ENG. 925: Maintaining Matriculation (MA) (70151)
Eng. 930: Maintaining Matriculation (DA) (70150)
Eng. 975: Doctoral Rsrch Essay Wkshp (DA) (75058)
(1 credit)
Leave a Reply